Paymob Raises $35 Million Pre-Series C to Expand Payments Across MENA

Paymob, an Egypt-founded payments infrastructure company, has raised $35 million in a pre-Series C round co-led by Mubadala Investment Company and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, with participation from British International Investment, Global Ventures and DPI Ventures. The round brings Paymob's total disclosed funding to more than $125 million.

Founded in 2015 by Islam Shawky, Alain El Hajj and Mostafa Menessy, Paymob operates an omnichannel payments platform that lets businesses accept both online and offline payments through a single technology layer covering more than 60 payment methods. The company now serves over 390,000 merchants across Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman, positioning it as one of the more established payments infrastructure providers across the Middle East and North Africa.

The new capital follows a $50 million Series B in 2022 and a $22 million Series B extension led by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 2024, making this the company's third major institutional raise in four years. Paymob says consolidated revenues grew threefold over the last 18 months, with revenue from Gulf Cooperation Council markets specifically growing sevenfold and now accounting for close to half of the company's total revenue, a sign that its expansion beyond its original Egyptian home market has meaningfully taken hold.

Paymob plans to use the new funding to expand its digital payments acceptance business further across the MENA region and to develop new products aimed at small and medium-sized merchants, as well as emerging agentic commerce use cases, where AI agents transact on behalf of consumers or businesses. The involvement of Mubadala, one of Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth funds, alongside a multilateral development bank in the EBRD, reflects the kind of blended strategic and development capital increasingly common in MENA fintech rounds at this stage, where investors are betting on both commercial returns and the broader financial-inclusion case for expanding digital payments infrastructure across underbanked SME segments.

For founders building payments infrastructure in emerging markets, Paymob's trajectory, steady institutional rounds roughly every two years paired with disciplined geographic expansion from a single home market into adjacent Gulf markets, offers a template that contrasts with the faster, larger rounds more common in Western fintech.

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